the carrier America was kept at around half a G—a reasonable compromise for crew members from Earth and those born and raised on Luna, Mars, or Ganymede. The surface gravity on Eta Boötis IV was 1.85 G, almost four times what he was used to. Another low swell passed, hitting him waist-high, and he did fall; the water was heavy, with a lot of momentum behind it. He landed on his hands and knees, struggling against the planet’s dragging pull.
His e-suit would keep him alive for days. Skin-tight, pressure sealed, and with a plastic helmet almost invisible in its clarity at optical wavelengths, it was colored bright orange to help rescue craft spot him, though on this red-orange world, they would have to rely on other wavelengths to see him. A nanobreather pack was attached to his right hip, with its small bottle of oxygen beneath. The unit would recycle oxygen from CO2 for days, and in an atmosphere, even a toxic one like this one, could pull oxygen and other gasses from the compounds outside, extending the unit’s life, and his, indefinitely.
None of that was likely to help, though, if he couldn’t reach friendly forces. He’d been shot down several hundred kilometers south of the Marine base—exactly how far, he wasn’t sure. Using his radio might well call down the Turusch equivalent of fire from heaven, so he wasn’t anxious to try that. His couch should have sent out a marker code when it touched down, a burst transmission, meaningless—he hoped—to the enemy, but indicating a successful ejection and landing.
The question, however, was whether to stay with the couch or try to reach the marine perimeter. Red-Mike was a long hike, but, on the other hand, he was nakedly exposed here on this tidal flat, and there would be clouds of Turusch drones moving through the area very soon, looking for him. And the drones would bring larger, more dangerous visitors.
Better, he decided, to be moving. He could work his way closer to the Marine perimeter, and give friendly forces a better chance of picking him up. If they could find him …
He didn’t think about how slender those chances might be. Hell, the Marines probably assumed he’d been shot down and killed, and couldn’t leave the safety of their protective screens in any case. His squadron was heavily engaged far above. They would be free to initiate a search only if the Turusch fleet left the area, and the Tushies weren’t about to do that if all they were facing was a handful of gravfighters.
The biggest problem, however, was moving. Gray couldn’t walk in Eta Boötis’s gravity, not for very far, at any rate. He would need some help.
The back of the couch opened up to reveal a compact emergency locker. Inside were extra bottles of oxygen for long-term excursions in hard vacuum, an M-64 laser carbine, medical and emergency survival packs, and a spider.
The spider was the size of a flattened football, with four legs folded up tight. When he activated the unit, the legs began unfolding, each extending for over a meter from the central body. Immediately, the unit moved behind him, put the tips of two legs on his shoulders to steady him, then began to snuggle in close, the main unit snuggling up against his spine, each leg adjusting and reconfiguring to conform exactly to his body. In seconds, it had adhered to his e-suit, clamped tight at ankles, knees, and hips. There was a vibrating whine of servos, and the unit straightened up, pulling him upright.
He stood now in knee-deep water, supported by the exoskeletal unit, or ESU, and when another heavy wave surged slowly past, it adjusted with his movement, shifted with his weight, and kept him upright. He took a sloshing, heavy step forward, then another. He still felt like he weighed 150 kilos—he did, after all—but he could stand without feeling like his knees were about to buckle, and the spider on his back fed his servos power enough to help counteract the drag of gravity. The extensions secured to his arms were flexible and slack at the moment; if he tried to lift something, however, they would match his movements and contribute with support and lift of their own. Wearing one of these rigs, a person could do anything he could do in his normal gravity field, including running, jumping, and lifting heavy objects. The word was that with practice he could run a Marathon and not get winded. They were standard issue to civilian tourists to Earth from low-G worlds like Mars.
Med kit and survival gear snapped to clamps on the spider, and the carbine slung over his right shoulder. He wouldn’t need the O2. There was plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere, bound up with carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbonyl sulfide, and a witch’s brew of other gasses, and his suit would have no trouble processing it to keep him alive almost indefinitely. The little unit would handle his food and water requirements as well, so long as he fed it CHON—shorthand for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. He needed to add an occasional handful of dirt or organic matter to provide trace elements like phosphorus and iron, necessary for the nanufacture of certain vitamins and amino acids.
There was no emergency survival radio in his survival kit, because, in fact, his e-suit had radio circuitry built into it, both for communication and for tracking. He needed line-of-sight to reach the Marine base directly, but his squadron and a large number of battlespace drones would be above the horizon now, somewhere above those blood-hued, low-hanging clouds.
A direct call to them, however, might generate way too much interest on the part of the Turusch, who would be closely monitoring the electronic environment around the planet, and a stray, coded signal might bring down anything from a KK projectile to a 100-megaton nuke.
His personal e-hancements, computer circuitry nanotechnically grown into the sulci of his brain, had downloaded both the ghost-shadow of his fighter’s AI and the position of the Marine base in those last seconds before he’d crashed. As he turned his head, his IHD hardware threw a green triangle up against his visual field, marking a spot on the horizon … in that direction, toward the beach.
That was where he had to go, then. Taking a last look around, he started wading toward the shore.
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
35.4 AUs from Eta Boötis
1330 hours, TFT
Admiral Koenig checked the time once again. The fleet had been traveling for 9.4 hours, accelerating constantly at 500 gravities. They were nearing the midpoint now, halfway between the Kuiper Belt space where they’d arrived in-system and their destination. Their speed at the moment was .77 c, fast enough that for every three minutes passing in the universe outside, only two minutes passed within the America.
It had been an uneventful passage so far, thank God. He was all too aware, however, that by now the gravfighters of VF-44 had reached the planet and were engaging the Turusch fleet.
He checked the time again. The Dragonfires had been mixing it up with the bad guys for forty-five minutes already, an eternity in combat. It was entirely possible that the fighting was over.
If so, twelve brave men and women were dead now—dead, or trapped in crumpled hulks on high-speed, straight-line vectors out of battlespace.
Best not to think about that. …
“Admiral?” the voice of Commander Katryn Craig, the CIC Operations officer, said in Koenig’s head. “Mr. Quintanilla is requesting permission to enter the CIC.”
Koenig sighed. He would rather have given orders that the civilian be kept off the command deck entirely, but he was under orders from Fleet Mars to cooperate with the jackass, and playing the martinet would not smooth the bureaucratic pathway in the least.
Politics. He made a sour face. Sometimes, it seemed as though his job was nothing else but.
“Let him in,” Koenig said, grudgingly.
Quintanilla
